"While valuable for helping patients, current hydrogels have limited clinical efficacy," said Kyung Jae Jeong, assistant professor of chemical engineering at UNH. "We discovered a simple solution to make the hydrogels more porous and therefore help to speed up the healing."

The use of mud or wet clay as a topical skin treatment or a poultice is a common practice in some cultures and the concept of using mud as medicine goes back to earliest times. Now Mayo Clinic researchers and their collaborators at Arizona State University have found that at least one type of clay may help fight disease-causing bacteria in wounds, including some treatment-resistant bacteria. The findings appear in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents.

New findings show that male pattern baldness and getting gray hair prematurely puts men under 40 at risk of heart disease. In fact, these men are five times likelier to develop the condition, representing a risk higher than the one posed by obesity.